The Plasma Science and Fusion Center has recently been reopened with renewed funding from Congress.  The laboratory is home to the Alcator C-Mod reactor, the highest magnetic machine in the world.  With refunding, the laboratory can go back to researching fusion energy.  As reported by WBUR in the article “Restored Federal Funding Re-Energizes MIT’s Fusion Center:”

The ultimate goal: to build a steady state reactor that keeps going like the sun and could power a city.

The fusion lab has the most employees and the biggest budget of any experiment on campus. It’s as big as science gets at MIT, in large measure because the promise is so great — a fusion reactor produces energy with virtually no deadly radioactive waste. It can’t possibly explode and the fuel is deuterium, derived from hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe.

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